Welcome to TheTradeSlinger's journey.

Background and purpose:

The purpose of this journal is to work on finding and eliminating psychological issues holding me back from successful trading and document my development as a trader.

My foremost problem is that I have been exiting winning trades far too soon (Ha! Have you ever heard that one before?).

Throughout this journal I will seek to increase the duration and magnitude of winning trades and develop my trading psychology into a winning mindset.

Inspirations

The main inspirations and influencing forces in my trading have come from three main sources:

1. TradeItDontDateIt
Lak's performance has been a great inspiration for me for many years. I model my ideal trading after his work.

2. @DbPhoenix and his work with the SLA/AMT
I've read and followed his work on nexusfi.com (formerly BMT) and other sites for years now. Discovering AMT has helped my trading tremendously.

3. YTC Trading Series of books and weekly emails
When starting out in trading I found the YTC series to be fantastic in putting price action trading into an understandable framework along with discussions of psychological issues relating to trading.

The Journal
I will be fully transparent in this journal and open to any discussions/questions/comments. I believe that participation by other traders can only help to advance everyone's development. I look forward to kicking this journal off!

Long days and pleasant nights to you

KEWLTECH

I've found this website to be great for price action trading concepts.

Kewltech approaches price action trading from a S/R, legs, and accum/distr patterns framework.

Still working my way through reading and working on the concepts within.

Anyone else read kewltech?




I plan to start trading in this journal tomorrow morning.

No trades today. In the meantime...

Here's a video of my trading from June 26th.

Poor performance overall, though I made a little money.

Weak implementation (to outright ignoring) of some SLA/AMT concepts.

I hope you'll find the video interesting, I will try to keep them fun for future videos.

(The last trade sequence is by far my best trade management of that day).

I've been exploring Kewltech a lot this week and a common theme of the kewltech methodology is advancing or declining momentum combined with accumulation and distribution.

ES has steadily declining momentum over this past week:



Declining momentum, approaching resistance, combined with failure to take out the day's highs.. Great combination for a short.

Shorted NQ at 4600:



Declining momentum and a sideways market = distribution.



Still holding short and will hold into the weekend as long as levels above aren't taken out.

Shorted ES at 2101.50 and covered at 2098.50 and 2099.25.

$304 closed on the day and $375 open pnl.

@DbPhoenix

SLA keeping me in the trade. (red line is 50%)

The SLA line is drawn in hindsight. I am getting comfortable with not even needing the lines. Thanks Db!

This weekend I will continue my studies of SLA/AMT combined with Levels/Accum/Distr/Momentum.

Perfect illustration of the fear of holding winning trades just now.

First two trades were what I was looking for, the third is the example I want to journal about now.

I put the trade on thinking the market would go down to at least 90 and then some (and it has as of this post), but almost immediately fear crept in and I closed it for a small (ONE TICK!) gain.

I think closing this trade early was fear of not wanting to be proven "wrong" on my assumption that the market would go down.

As soon as the fear creeps in I seem to "freeze up" and forget everything I know about trading.

Any suggestions on how to work on this?



Up $140.60 so far today.

TheTradeSlinger 

I put the trade on thinking the market would go down my assumption that the market would go down. Any suggestions on how to work on this?

Why were you (1) thinking that the market would go down and (2) assuming that it would?

Work on these first.

DbPhoenix 

Why were you (1) thinking that the market would go down and (2) assuming that it would? Work on these first.

I was shorting the retest of the wedge, expecting at least the base as a target.



Taking a deep breath and letting the market do its thing along with SLA (as with my NQ trade last week) might have looked something like this:

With maybe an exit at 89.75 or 90.

DbPhoenix 

Why were you (1) thinking that the market would go down and (2) assuming that it would? Work on these first.

I am trying to wrap my head around this @DbPhoenix.

I'm thinking doesn't every trade (directional trading) have to start with a "choice" of thinking up or down for some reason or another?

Or maybe it's more subtle, it is simply an entry condition has been met one way or the other without assumptions as to the outcome before hand?